By Justin Herrmann
I’ve flown thirty miles south from Kotzebue to Deering to help the regular janitor Morris wax the clinic.
At the runway I climb into the clinic ambulance next to Jana the clinic supervisor. She blows thick smoke out the cracked window and says, “You’ve been gaining weight.” It’s not a question. My daughter and her mother moved back to Wisconsin a few months ago. Some changes, like my weight have been rapid. Other things, like an empty bedroom containing tiny unmatched socks and ghostly-light hairs that cling to the sofa and curtains, haven’t changed enough.
“Muskox,” Jana says, which is not the most unkind thing expressed towards me today, but then she nods her sunglassed face a direction away from town. I can make out several stout bodies on the tundra. None of the muskoxen appear to move in anyway, like heart-stopping deer-shaped lawn ornaments back in the Midwest.
I set a backpack full of Diet Coke down in Morris’ janitor’s closet, hand him one. He flashes a rough, yet charismatic grin, like a toothless Jeff Goldblum. We can’t do much except a little prep work till the clinic closes and everyone goes home. He hangs his mop and I ask him to walk with me.
The village of Deering has around a hundred residents, one store, one school, zero restaurants, zero liquor stores, one road that leads to the airport, the other to the dump. Homes stretch out single-file line along Kotzebue Sound. All property is beachfront property.
We walk along the thin strip of patchy grass and pebbles between ocean and homes. I look for beach glass. A chainless husky languidly gnaws a moose bone.
Morris says he’s on final warning for sleeping in the ambulance. That he wasn’t sleeping during work hours seems ok to me since in addition to cleaning the clinic he drives the ambulance during emergencies.
My first mornings with my son’s mother were spent in robes, bare feet cool against wet pebbles, eyes scanning beige and gray for glints of green and amber on the same strip of beach along Lake Michigan generations of her family walked. All fifteen pieces found those mornings were saved in a jar for a child I didn’t yet believe we’d make. That jar remains on my kitchen windowsill, many pieces added over the years, a few lost.
Today I find a blue one. The only blue glass I can think of in bottle form is Bud Light Platinum, which no one I know drinks, and most of what’s drank in the arctic, myself being my main source of knowledge on this matter, comes in plastic or aluminum. Much of the glass I find here is more regular glass than beach glass, not yet properly rounded and cloudy. Morris finds a couple fishing hooks he plans to reuse. We find a decomposing raven, headless. And then a seal, also headless. It’s a short walk. Morris, a man of few words, doesn’t think anyone’s purposely cutting heads off stuff.
Back at the clinic, the sky rumbles. Health aides join me and Morris outside. It’s the first time I’ve heard thunder in two years. Cheers erupt each time the sky calls out. Rain begins. In the distance the muskoxen appear livelier, though Morris says maybe it’s just two males fighting over the harem.
Winds rise. The sky darkens. We all hope for lightning to strike.
Justin Herrmann is the author of Highway One, Antarctica (MadHat Press). His stories have appeared in Best Small Fictions and in journals including River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Mid-American Review, and New World Writing. He lives in Alaska.